Everything Everywhere Once A Week (2/10/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once a Week, a weekly newsletter powered by your Patreon contributions. Every week, we run down the biggest stories in gaming with a mixture of news and personal thoughts. While the obvious news to cover is the Nintendo Direct this week, we did kind of aptly cover that show with this week’s Materia Possessions, though I will be touching on a few bits from it. First, I want to talk general Nintendo numbers.

The Switch is Currently the Third Best-Selling Console of All Time But That’s Not the Important Number

This past quarter, the Switch overcame the Gameboy and the PlayStation 4 to become the third best-selling console of all time. It is only behind the DS and the PlayStation 2, which are themselves only a million apart at 154 million and 155 million respectively. To beat either of those consoles, the Switch would have to sell another 30 million units and change, which is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Logical thinking suggests it will probably come up short of that number in the autumn years of its life, but games like Tears of the Kingdom and the inevitable next Pokemon could be the exact right titles to drag it over that line.

That software is key, though, because the number no one is talking about is that the Switch is closing in a billion software units sold. That would make Nintendo’s hybrid platform the second console ever to reach this number. The first is the PlayStation 2 with over 1.5 billion games sold, a number the Switch is almost certainly not going to reach, though it reached most of the way there in significantly less time on the market.

The reason this number is significant is because it is both representative of the way the gaming market has changed in the last two decades and that it also gives Nintendo important data about how Switches are purchased. It might seem odd for there to be more Switch games sold than on consoles with higher userbases, like the DS, but that there are gives us insight into how much digital distribution has changed things. It’s a lot more convenient to buy games from a digital store now and variable pricing that this opened up — giving options that range from $2.99 to $69.99 — means that a lot of smaller purchases are made more often. This seems obvious, sure, but try telling yourself in 2008 that this is how numbers will inflate.

It also tells us that while Switch hardware sales can in some way be attributed to people buying multiple systems, it’s either statistically marginal or that the Switch has somehow tapped into a game buying audience far beyond other hardcore gaming platforms. I think it’s just more likely that the Switch hardware is mostly selling to unique players, if not unique households.

That said, this household has two people and four Switches so maybe I’m arguing against myself here.

Game Numbers!

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is at 52 million units. It’s not GTA6 numbers, but nothing is. Assuming the DLC has kept the sales momentum going, it might be fair to credit the Expansion Pass as the most successful post-launch DLC a video game has ever had.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sold more in the last quarter than Bayonetta 3 has period.
• That said, Bayonetta 3 did surprisingly alright. At 1.04 million, it’s clear there was a Switch bump for the game as anticipated, but it’s a little lower that I expected. It has sold exactly as much in one quarter as Bayonetta 2 on Switch had sold in two years.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3, despite all indications that it should have blown past Xenoblade 2 and Xenoblade: Definitive Edition in sales, is selling beyond the latter and slower than the former. It is entirely possible that Xenoblade 3 does not end up outselling Xenoblade 2. Part of that could be that the first year of the Switch had, by definition, a smaller library and thus far fewer options. It could have been that, as derided as they were, Xenoblade 2’s hornier designs did appeal more to a silent JRPG audience. Xenoblade 3 could also in theory just rally with DLC or a slower spring season. At the moment, though, the series occupies a niche that is less consistent than expected.
• There is a possible argument in these two examples that, for the more “hardcore” games that aren’t named like Mario or Zelda, fans took their bites of the apple already and are satiated or in some other way done with the Switch. Maybe Astral Chain did better because it was an interesting new thing that came out when the Switch was hotter. Bayonetta 3 looking comparatively “old” despite being a better game might mean slower sales than expected, but that’s also assuming a lot about the future.
• Pokemon Scarlet & Violet clock in at 20.61 million copies, a number I’m admittedly conflicted about. Great sales for a surprisingly well-designed Pokemon game, but as much as sales can send a message, I wonder what this says to Nintendo and Game Freak. That game is embarrassing in a lot of bad ways, but it’s also clear that much of the audience just doesn’t care. Is that a good thing? Should not caring about some actual real, fucked up issues with a game be laudable? I guess we’ll have to see with the next Pokemon game whether Game Freak takes it on their own shoulders to improve or if the modus operandi from here on out will just be “Ship it and fix it later if we have time.”
• Splatoon’s lifetime sales were 4.91 million and it was enough to convince Nintendo the game was a hit. Splatoon 2 matched those sales in five months. Splatoon 3 has doubled Splatoon 2’s five-month sales in four months.
• In its various permutations, News Super Mario Bros. U has sold around 20 million units. To put it another way, massive success Marvel’s Spider-Man sold about the same amount combining PS4, PS5, and PC sales.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land is chugging along, having picked up nearly a million extra sales in the last quarter. It broke the series record before that, but is extending its lead over Kirby’s Dreamland, the previous record holder.

If Games Are Selling This Well, Why is the Price Going Up?

Honestly not a terrible question and one that has new relevance in the face of Nintendo announcing that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to a game that has sold 30 million copies, is going to cost $10 more than the first game did in 2017. There’s been a lot of shock and annoyance about this and people declaring with absolute certainty that it’s not justified. But is that accurate? Well, kinda?

[For simplicity’s sake, I’m mostly going to use American prices and talk about the market here, I know games cost more elsewhere.]

Video games are shockingly resilient against inflation. Cartridge prices made the 90s kind of a wild west of inconsistently exorbitant MSRPs, but the disc era and beyond kept prices per-platform pretty level. We also treated those prices as a direct consequence of the technology of the platform — handheld games were cheaper because those games were not as pricey to make, which made sense to the average consumer. Game prices went up with the HD era because the technology got better and the argument that HD assets cost more — higher definition, uh, by definition — is easy to swallow.

For marketing purposes, pairing those increases with technological arguments makes total sense. It is easy to visually look at Gears of War compared to, say, The Bouncer and say the former is a $60 video game while the other made sense at $50. But it also meant that game companies just kicked the can down the road for the next price increase. Game prices going up should have been treated as an inevitability, but that argument rightfully makes consumers upset, so it was framed differently to just get it through the door. As a result, we started treating games as requiring a visual upgrade to justify the cost.

You can see this on a different scale with indie games. There was a time where the idea of any game on XBLA costing more $14.99 was treated as an affront. I have burned into my memory a rumor that Castle Crashers, a hotly-anticipated arcade brawler, was going to be $19.99 and people got so upset that the developers had to publish an image of one of the knights shrugging with a shocked look captioned “The price has not been announced yet!!!”

And still today you see resistance to games with pixel art or simpler graphics being over $30 or $40. A game that’s locked to a 2D perspective costing $60 genuinely upsets people and if you press them on it, you will usually be told that it’s seemingly less work to put out a game like, say, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze than Horizon: Forbidden West.

Which it may actually be, but it allows people to think that they are getting a deal for a massive game with significant 3D artwork at full price and anything that does not hew to that standard is not a deal. So when that ceiling raises, they are no longer getting that deal. But the complexity of art design is not where the money in game development generally goes, it’s everything about a game. Design, iteration, stubborn bugs, inspiration from other material, etc. It’s hours paid. Yes, those hours go up with higher definition assets, but it’s only one part of the overall package of things getting more complex and taking longer.

Games cost more to make largely because teams are bigger and they take longer.

And it’s easier to say, well let’s cut down on long development cycles, celebrity voice actors, game length, etc. But we also celebrate those things openly and in many cases reward them with sales and awards and cultural cache far beyond the games that don’t do them.

The question then comes to justification, does a publisher making profit on their games need to raise the prices on their games? Probably not. There are probably solutions and workarounds to it. They could scale the games back, though we’ve talked about why they don’t do that. They could be less reactive to market trends, they could work with smaller teams, etc. They have decided, however, that the better solution is to up the game cost. They do not “need” to raise costs, but they have decided other options do not work for them.

It’s worth noting that when Breath of the Wild came out, it was $59.99. That same $60 is equivalent to $73.52 now. The problem with accounting for inflation is that wages remain stagnant as buying power decreases and cost of living skyrockets, so raising prices makes for tighter wallets rather than an equivalent purchase at a higher number. Games traditionally resist this, but as luxury items, I’d probably rather they go up than, like, food. Unfortunately both just go up.

But I understand fully why people get upset about it. I don’t think it’s greed — not directly, at least. It’s greed in the sense that companies are trying to maintain a status quo, but the $10 price raise does not significantly raise bottom lines.

I think people are right to be wary of price increases. And I think people should measure where they think their own personal line is for how much something is worth and either buy at that price or not. But stop thinking this is just about how a game looks. That’s a path that’s only going to make this untenable.

Other Things:

• A brand new Materia Possessions this week covering the Nintendo Direct and games we’ve been playing like Infernax, Hi-Fi Rush, Magic the Gathering, and more.
• I had not yet finished Infernax when we recorded that podcast, but I have now. I think that game’s fine but a lot of the cheap parts really frustrated me. I suppose when we want the nostalgic feel of old games, we want them to also feel more modern in the right ways. This game has some ol’ bullshit here and there that I’d rather do without.